ART CITIES:Istanbul-Serra Behar
Every one of Serra Behar’s works can be evaluated as a concrete reflection of the situations corresponding to a specific period of her life. In her work, the artist reflects a conscious surrender to the action and non-stop transformation of life, using concepts of motion and change of expression. She conveys the completed process of life and its ongoing fluency with figurative expression by combining materials like leather, x-ray films, genuine bones, polyester, cables, computer tools and antique wooden pieces with animatronic and various animation techniques.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Zilberman Gallery Archive
Serra Behar’s solo exhibition “Sleepwalkers” is on presentation at Zilberman Projects space in Istanbul. A multidisciplinary artist working in the field of sculpture, installation and interactive elements, Serra Behar presents her project as the continuation of a dream in the same level as the gallery space in a way that the project becomes a venue-specific integrative installation. Insofar as her artistic practice is predominantly based on conceptuality and material, Behar is describing the artists as individuals who “embody stories” and communicates with the viewer the concretized output of her interest in esoteric matters. She uses the techniques of animation to energize the material such as leather, radiogram, real bones, polyester, electronic cables and antique furniture that she uses in her works. Looking at her personal experiences in the light of society, each of Behar’s works reflects a different stage in her life. “I’m not an artist of one subject. I work with the materials that help me express what I want to say at that particular time. It’s a way of trying to understand me actually, a kind of diary” she says. In “Sleepwalkers” Behar is tackling with the sleep-dream discourse and focuses on the state of illusion and living in a parallel universe. Hers is an invitation for us to think upon the way we purposefully fall asleep and wear masks. Once entered into the project space, the viewer faces with pillows that lie on the corner as a representation of self-alienation, the initial step of the state of forgetting and acceptance of one’s being in the sleep, all which is endemic to our current era. The pillows are leading the viewer towards an interior room where a bedhead of almost three-meter-long is present and links with the exhibition’s mise en scène. The bedhead that Behar found in a junk shop is nurtured with an Art Deco style and post-apocalyptic visuality. One leg stuck in the concrete and the other wrapping to a greenery, the bedhead is getting monumental with its similarity to an arch. The story that the artist has gradually built ends with a found wooden icon whose circular hollows are reminiscent of the eyes. The plastic lambs that the artist places inside these hollows describe a generation that stand for awakening. The absence of lambs in some of the hollows –hollows that might be perceived as concretizing a sort of iconoclasm– are in fact the representation of an escape. Moreover, visitors are accompanied, throughout the exhibition, by the lullabies in Persian, Serbian, Ladino and Turkish languages the source of which is a chorus made up of different ethnic origins that the artist put together. And these lullabies are there as a reference to a system which makes us sleep.
Info: Zilberman-Project Space Istanbul, Istiklal Cad. No.163 Mısır Apartmanı K.3, Beyoğlu / Istanbul, Duration: 3/3-28/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-19:30, Sat 12:00-19:00, http://zilbermangallery.com
